Monday, June 11, 2007

Way back in 1986, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), then, as now, the principal agent of leviathan leftism in the Senate, sponsored an immigration bill. Then, as now, illegal aliens had flooded the country. And then, as now, the Senate had an answer: amnesty. Kennedy said a few things worth remembering: “This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this.”

“Never again” is a mighty long time, much longer than the 21 years that have elapsed since Kennedy made his fulsome promise. Illegal aliens are 10 times the number they were then. Americans are angry about them, want to build a wall at what used to be the border with Mexico, and seek punishment for employers who hire illegals. Legislators such as Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., have proposed legislation to do those things.

Yet now, Kennedy, with President Bush, offers the “compromise” hatched in the Senate on May 17, while the U.S. House of Representatives, shunning Tancredo and his supporters, cobbled together the STRIVE Act (H.R. 1645). Though the Senate bill’s sponsors deny the truth, Rep. Elton Gallegly of California quickly summed up what the Senate’s monstrosity is: “amnesty, amnesty, and amnesty,” for at least 12 million aliens who illegally crossed the border with Mexico.

That apt description also fits the STRIVE bill. Both bills, Americans are told, “solve” the problem of illegal immigration, which legislators promised to do, in an efficient if novel and bold manner. In mid-May, we learned just how bold the Senate solution was: it would stop illegal immigration and deal with illegal aliens by legalizing the 12 million illegals, and, for all intents and purposes, dissolving the border with Mexico.

The ultimate object of the political elites pushing amnesty is not simply amnesty to legalize the illegals, of course, but something far more subversive, given the language of the STRIVE bill. “Immigration reform” is a Trojan horse in the plan to create a North American Union modeled after the European Union.*

Reform or Revolution?“Reform,” of course, is the word politicians use when they want to slip one by the people who elected them, and on that note it’s worth rehearsing the old adage that Americans are safest when Congress has adjourned. The immigration legislation before the Senate, and the so-called STRIVE bill before the House, prove that one a dozen times over.

The Senate “compromise” was announced by Ted Kennedy, who was surrounded by nine senators (seven of them Republican!) and two Bush administration Cabinet secretaries. President Bush swiftly burbled his approbation: “I want to thank the members of the Senate who worked hard [on the compromise legislation]. I appreciate the leadership shown on both sides of the aisle.” He added: “Immigration is a tough issue for a lot of Americans. The agreement reached today is one that will help enforce our borders, but equally importantly, it will treat people with respect. This is a bill where people who live here in our country will be treated without amnesty, but without animosity.”

The president lied. Americans can only hope that patriotic members of Congress derail this train before it leaves the station. If the Senate bill passes intact, or in some invidious amalgamation with the STRIVE bill in the House, we can say hasta la vista to the border with Mexico. Unsurprisingly, the world’s greatest deliberative body did not have a copy of their 380-page bill ready for public inspection, but enough details have emerged to let us know that if stopping illegal immigration is its purpose, it’s a dog that just won’t hunt.

According to the Associated Press, the bill’s major provisions fall into four categories. Perhaps the bill’s worst provisions apply to illegal aliens already here. “They could come forward immediately and receive probationary legal status,” AP reports, and the bill creates a new “four-year ‘Z’ visa” for all illegals who landed here before January 1. Illegals can “adjust status to lawful permanent residence” simply by paying a $5,000 fine, but the head of a family must first return home. How the government would ensure these people return home is anyone’s guess, given that it claims it cannot deport them now, but at any rate, the bill also permits anyone under 30, brought here as a minor, to procure a green card in three years instead of eight. “Undocumented farmworkers who can demonstrate they have worked 150 hours or three years in agriculture can apply for green cards.” But green cards for “Z visa” holders won’t be issued until the border and workplace security measures are in place, which will take about 18 months.

The bill also includes a new “guest-worker” program. These workers will hold “Y” visas, renewable three times. Nearly a half-million could get them initially, but that figure will change “with annual adjustments based on market fluctuations.” The bill requires a worker to go home before renewing it, but again, one wonders how or whether the government will enforce this provision.

Nor does the bill forget “future immigrants,” and it will continue, at least partially, the insidious practice of “chain migration,” which enables an immigrant to pack his entire family across the border. Though an immigrant could bring a spouse and minor child, he could not bring adult children and siblings.

The bill simply assumes a line of customers from the border to Mexico City. The government will pass out 380,000 visas a year “based on a point system, with about 50 percent based on employment criteria, 25 percent based on education, 15 percent on English proficiency and 10 percent on family connections.” This last measure upsets liberals and some religious activists because “family unification principles,” leftist House Speaker Nancy Pelosi avers, “have been fundamental to American immigration.”

As border security goes, the bill would require the federal government to hire 18,000 new border patrol agents, build 370 miles of fence along the border with Mexico, create 200 miles of vehicle barriers and take other security measures, including installing radar and camera towers, adding unmanned aerial vehicles and banning the catch-and-release policy for illegal aliens nabbed at the border. The bill would also require providing for the detention of 27,500 illegals per day annually and creating identification measures to prevent them from working.

As far as work goes, the bill would require employers to verify, electronically, the eligibility of new employees, and it would increase penalties for employers who break the law.

What the bill doesn’t explain, of course, is how any of this benefits the American people. Then again, the debate over immigration always turns on what’s good for the immigrants, not what’s good for the American people. That might be one reason, as the Washington Post reported, the Senate gave militant Hispanic groups — “Latinos” in the euphemistic jargon of the immigration debate — “virtual veto power” over the bill.

Reported the Post,

When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) declared last week that unnamed “stakeholders” would decide whether Congress overhauls immigration law this year, Latino organizations in Washington understood exactly what he meant.

After laboring in obscurity for decades, groups such as the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the National Immigration Forum are virtually being granted veto power over perhaps the biggest domestic issue coming before Congress this year....

“There’s a real sense that the Latino community is key to the solution in this debate, so now they are reaching out to us more than ever,” said Eric Gutierrez, lead lobbyist for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF. “Neither party wants to make a misstep politically.”

Such groups were practically in the room yesterday, maintaining contact as Democratic and Republican senators tried to hammer out a new immigration bill.

The National Council of La Raza is just one of many “Latino” groups whose militant policies are starkly anti-American and baldly racist, yet Senator Kennedy just as frankly admitted such groups controlled the bill.

The long and short of the bill is this: most of its provisions benefit illegal aliens, not Americans. A greater burden is placed on employers to ferret out illegals, who shouldn’t be here in the first place, for instance, and the bill does not address some other important issues.

Writing at the website of National Review, George Borjas at Harvard University explained what the bill really means: “Any ‘reform’ that gives amnesty to 12 million illegal immigrants without taking care of the underlying illegal-immigration problem is a lemon. After all, what guarantees that the current batch of 12 million illegal immigrants will not be replaced by another 12 million in just a few years? What guarantees that guest workers will not stay illegally in the United States after their visa expires? What guarantees that border enforcement will be taken seriously by the Bush administration in the next two years or by the Democratic administration after that?”

Borjas asks a key question: what guarantees that the illegals who are supposed to go back home and apply for legal status will leave? Consider this remark from one illegal immigrant who spoke to Agence France Presse. “I don’t really understand that much about the bill,” he said, “but I’d have to be crazy to go back to Mexico to apply for visa now that I am already in the US. They wouldn’t give me a visa there.” Smart thinking. Surely, this muchacho isn’t the only one of his ilk, and just as surely no one believes the head of a household will pack up and leave his family to return home and begin the long process of legalization. On that count alone, the bill is absurd. Its premise is that people with no respect for current immigration law will respect its reincarnation. Truth is, if they do not obey the law now, they will not obey it in the future.

So the answers to Borjas’ questions, to borrow from Gallegly, are nothing, nothing, and nothing. Americans have no guarantee that illegal aliens won’t continue surging across the border and set up another crisis in five or 10 years requiring yet another “reform” that is actually amnesty.

“An amnesty is an amnesty,” Borjas wrote, “no matter how it is packaged and spun. The guest-worker program will surely enrich employers, but will exacerbate the downward trajectory in the economic status of poorer workers.” This, of course, doesn’t matter to the elites, who claim they need those poor workers “to do the jobs Americans won’t do.”

The Real Plan: North American UnionOf course, the United States doesn’t “need” to legalize 12 million illegal aliens for a non-existent labor shortage, which raises the question of why the political elite want to do so. On VDARE.com, immigration analyst Juan Mann, who also runs the DeportAliens.com website, explained the amnesty clauses in the STRIVE bill and something even more ominous: its creation of a supranational border-control policy. Among the amnesty provisions in STRIVE, are a new worker program, and amnesty for children under 16 years old, farm and forestry workers, and illegal aliens related to victims killed on 9/11. Persecuted religious minorities will receive enhanced asylum and the bill also creates a non-immigrant worker program.

Still, Mann wrote, “My advice [is to] keep your eye on the ball … and the ball is called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) plan.” The STRIVE Act would move us closer to a common North American passport, he concludes, “but even more radical, H.R. 1645 also intends a common immigration policy for the United States, Canada and Mexico.” The explanation for the continental immigration policy appears in Section 113. Apparently, Congress is no longer concerned with American national security; the section is titled, “Reports on Improving the Exchange of Information on North American Security.”

Section 113 requires “developing and implementing an immigration security strategy for North America that works toward the development of a common security perimeter by enhancing technical assistance for programs and systems to support advance automated reporting and risk targeting of international passengers.”

Stop the InsanityBut that isn’t all. Section 113 mandates “working with Canada and Mexico to encourage foreign governments to enact laws to combat alien smuggling and trafficking, and laws to forbid the use and manufacture of fraudulent travel documents and to promote information sharing.” Incredibly, the section also requires exploring methods for Canada, Mexico, and the United States to waive visa requirements for nationals and citizens of the same foreign countries.

In the post-9/11 world, one wonders what would possess any thinking member of Congress to suggest waiving visa requirements for any foreign national, much less those flowing across a border completely lacking security. No one knows how many terrorists have crossed the border with Mexico since 9/11. If the purpose of immigration legislation is securing the borders, waiving visa requirements certainly won’t help if foreigners can cross them freely without harassment. Then again, the United States will not have borders. Rather, it will have a common “security perimeter,” within which any foreign national from any country could travel once the SPP waives visa requirements. Nothing would stop a terrorist from landing in a country within the “security perimeter,” but even if by some miracle the countries within the security perimeter were good partners in “perimeter control,” American sovereignty will still have been lost.

Having parsed the gobbledygook, Mann rightly asks, “What exactly will be the ‘immigration security strategy for North America?’ And will this new regional immigration policy have anything whatsoever to do with the interests of the United States?”

Such an “immigration strategy” is not in the interests of the United States. It is, however, in the interests of the global corporate and political elites who want to create the North American superstate. They can accomplish that by altering the relationship between the United States and its neighbors, i.e., by erasing the borders.

That is why neither bill flatly suggests deporting illegal aliens, but rather simply accepts their ubiquity, the excuses being that the government could not deport them if it wanted to, but it doesn’t want to anyway because “they do the jobs Americans won’t do.” Again, Borjas and others have repeatedly refuted this falsehood, which means the politicians pushing “immigration reform” have something else in mind. That would be the SPP.

So the real purpose of both bills is not stopping illegal immigration, but exacerbating it by legalizing the criminal aliens already here, which requires convincing Americans their economy cannot survive without them. And once these 12 million are legalized, others will get the message. As well, “guest-worker” provisions would create an unimpeded flow of Mexicans into the United States, which would lower wages to the benefit of the SPP’s corporate and political backers.

Thus does the seemingly unsolvable “crisis” of immigration provide the opportunity the elites require to take the next irreversible step toward the North American Union. Without borders, illegal immigration is no problem. And neither are American law, sovereignty, and citizenship, which currently thwart the political and corporate elites pushing these two amnesty bills.

The immigration legislation before Congress casts the die not only for cultural and national ruin, but also for North American Union. It would dissolve the United States. The American people can stop it if they wish, but how badly they wish to stop it is another matter. Some senators said they will vote for the bill because constituents are silent about it. If true, the country is lurching toward ruin faster than the most gloomy pessimist might think, which means now is the time for the American remnant to scale the ramparts. Recalling Kennedy’s infamous promise back in 1986, now is the time to say “never again.” And mean it. This treason can be stopped.

Some interesting info from article I came across over weekend. Doesn't get to specifics of the environmental regs, but helpful in understanding why the government is the problem in regards to gasoline prices. Write your local congressman and Senators.

One gallon of oil can produce up to 2/3 gallon of gasoline pending formulation, grade of octane desired, etc.

Between 1977 and 2005, the rate of return on investment in gas refining was <7% (Carol Dahl, economist, Colorado School of Mines) compared to >11.5% for the S&P 500 Industrials.

From 1994-2003 refiners spent $47.4 Billion just to bring existing refineries up to compliance with environmental regs.

1980 U.S. had 300+ refineries. Today, less than 150!

In 1990 there were still 194.

Even with the government enacting such legislation, U.S. refiners have managed to grow refining capacity by about 1%/year over past decade by doing small add-ons at existing refineries.

Highest state tax is NY at 60.8 per gallon. Nationwide average was 45.8 as of spring 2007. It is estimated that the oil industry is making about .13 per gallon-some estimates are closer to .10. So all states with one exception, Alaska, are making more in tax revenue per gallon than the oil companies are in profits!

The Cato Institute points out that federal govt mandates oil refiners use at least 4 Billion gallons of ethanol regardless of cost of the ethanol product and regardless of cost to produce ethanol. At the height of summer 2006, wholesale ethanol was TWICE the price of wholesale conventional gasoline.

One interesting reason we didn't think about for cost increases is all the "boutique, government-mandated gasoline formulations" as the author of the article put it, that the refiners are required to produce, sometimes on a state by state basis, especially CA. So refining capacity is sucked up by specialty formulations that cannot be distributed in all states. You can't just produce three or four different (87,89,91,93), 100% oil derived octane fuels and sell them anymore. And anyone who runs large production lines will tell you cost involved with bringing a line up to produce on thing and then shutting down, and producing another product on that same line. there are also regs dictating a certain amount of low sulfer diesel formulation.